Archive for August 4th, 2009
Did The Chicago Diner Commit Charitable Fraud Using Palin's Name at Chicago's 2009 Market Days?
This past weekend, August 1-2 2009, was Market Days here in Chicago. For those unfamiliar, Market Days is a giant street festival that takes up all of Boystown. The street is closed from Belmont to Addison, and all along the sidewalks booths are set up selling food or drink, various tee shirts and crafts, or offering information of various kinds regarding social services, political candidates, products from T-Mobile, etc. It’s billed as the largest LGBTQ street festival in the Midwest, and attracts over 300,000 people, easily, each of the festival’s two days.
The Chicago Diner is a vegetarian restaurant located at Roscoe and Halsted, smack in the middle of Boystown (3411 N. Halsted, Chicago IL 60613 (773) 935-6696 feedback@veggiediner.com or chef@veggiediner.com).
It’s been around since 1983 and has raw, vegan “cheesecake” and vegan “milkshakes” that are, in all honesty, pretty darn good (and that’s coming from committed non-vegetarians). The staff who work there are as liberal as you can possibly be, resplendent with piercings and vibrant rainbow hair colors. The whole establishment seems more at home in Seattle than Chicago (like it was shrunk, Kandor-style, dropped into a patchouli pouch, and then embiggened halfway across the country in its new home in Boystown, sandwiched between an auto glass repair shop and a 711). Customers have Caucasian dreadlocks, own more tie-dye than roadies for The Dead, and cover every inch of themselves in O-bot paraphernalia whenever possible. It’s a surreal experience to eat there — if the staff detects even the slightest glimpse of conservatism, their friendliness drops immediately. There’s always a definite “Us” vs. “Them” vibe at this place, intended or not, which might just be the nature of a vegetarian establishment in a meat and potatoes city like Chicago, as not only politically, but also in terms dietary, they find themselves fighting ideological battles that never end. Plus, without eating meat, they probably get exhausted and crabby more easily.
So, we’re not surprised by what The Chicago Diner did at the 2009 Market Days. Not in the least. We are intrigued, however, by the thought that they might not, in the end, be able to get away with it legally.
Read the rest of this entry »
Going Forward
The last two months have been brutal around here. Our good friend Lionel lost his battle with prostate cancer, which was a major blow, but it was something that was seen and expected for some time. He died with the quiet dignity and grace that were his hallmarks in life. Out of respect to his partner Todd, we had to stop talking about Lionel here because Todd didn’t like some of the nasty comments trolls would leave on occasion — that would sit up before we could catch them. Nasty, vile things from people out there in the world who never knew Lionel, but who were happy a gay man was dying of cancer (which they delighted in attributing, falsely, to AIDS). There were about 1-2 of those hateful comments for ever 50 prayers, but it’s a sad fact that the nasty things are what most of us remember. We wish there was something profound we could say about life and death here and now that would be of some use to someone out there, but we’re too numb still.
On the heels of Lionel’s passing came another sudden, shock death of a great friend from Team Hillary who we canvassed with in Pennsylania and who went with us on the Philly pub crawl with Chelsea and Ed Rendell. Pancreatic cancer, which came out of nowhere, and took her a few months after diagnosis. She didn’t even let on she was sick until a few weeks before the end, saying she knew how busy everyone was and how she didn’t want to inconvenience them.
We don’t know what to say about that…but wish she had told us so we could have at least been praying for her. But, that was her choice and we respect it. She was in her 50s and though she suffered greatly at the end, the woman kept her positive spirit alive to the last breathe. Never did we realize how strong, courageous, and selfless so many people in our lives were.
Three weeks ago, we found out another friend of ours has anal cancer, the kind that took Farrah Fawcett — which is doubly hard on him because, being a gay man, he has to endure tasteless jokes at the hands of the clods around him back in Greater Cleveland. This is something we’ve stressed here repeatedly: the people in Cleveland are good people at heart, but they have a distinct sense of humor all their own, believing things are funny that normal people find tasteless. Laughing at someone’s misfortune, back in Cleveland, is calling “just funnin’ with ya!”. ”Did you here Mark’s got ANAL cancer? Ha ha, wonder how that faggot got that, huh? Ha ha”.
We truly WISH people back in Ohio don’t really come up with things like that, but hearing it with our own ears, from people who are supposedly Mark’s friends, is just too much. ”Oh, lighten up. You move to the big city and get all Chicago and you can’t take a joke anymore. We’re just funnin’ with Mark, that’s all.”
It’s been indescribably hard to post anything on this site for a while because our hearts just haven’t been into keeping up with politics while so much around us collapsed. Even we never realized how much effort this site takes, on a daily basis. It is an enormous burden — and a huge strain to forever be positive and cheerful and funny and informative.
When you are beaten down into the ground by life, and the hits just keep on coming, something’s gotta give.
And we have to tell you, the amount of nasty comments that have piled up in our absence staggers us. This site takes up all of our free time — and requires immense commitment to original content and continuous prose, typically topping 4,000+ words a day. That’s more content in less than a week than the likes of Vanity Fair and other glossies put out in a whole month. There’s no staff. There are no interns. There are no salaries. It’s a couple guys in Boystown doing all of this for free.
And when a perfect storm of challenges and tragedies aims right at us and forces us to decamp while we pull things back together, we’re stunned by the audacity of some of you out there to say such nasty things because we haven’t entertained you in a while.
For free.
At great personal expense in terms of time, energy, personal sanity, and quality of life.
What’s truly sick about that is that it’s not the trolls making those comments. The trolls leave their little droppings in the form of “Oh, look, they abandoned this blog! We won! Yah!” and then basically move on, to wherever trolls go. No, the nastiest bits come from people who say they enjoy our writing — and are angry we are not entertaining them at their command for free on a continously and, at the moment, impossible to maintain basis.
We just don’t understand that.
Once, we read an article about JK Rowling and she said she got the same kind of nastiness in between the Potter books: people angry with her for not writing faster or not giving them hints at what she was working on. People who thought they owned Rowling because they read every word she wrote.
That’s beyond creepy, people.
A few times, people have scared us like that in public too, recognizing one of us from either the site or a news clip or something, and it all adds into the question of whether this is something we want to keep doing going forward.
This site started as a way of keeping other local Hillary Dems involved and informed during the 2008 primaries. It then morphed into a DeMcCrats for McCain effort. Post-election, we became moderate voices speaking out against the liberals running wild in Washington spending money faster than it could ever be printed.
After taking so much grief in this summer, we have to tell you, from the bottom of our hearts, that we are tired and are spirits are truly broken. Though he didn’t mean to, Lionel’s partner Todd off-handedly said something that haunts us — this was after the funeral, about a week later, and he was pretty drunk. He gave us a guilt trip for not spending more time with Lionel when he was sick, because we were always busy going to political events or writing on this site. Todd made a jab that entertaining people on the Internet was more important than spending time with a dying friend.
The next day, when he sobered up, he knew he went too far and apologized. No one blames him for lashing out, because as rough as it is to have lost such a good friend, we don’t even want to imagine what it’s like for Todd, since he and Lionel were together for 20+ years, give or take.
But, we should have spent more time with Lionel. And we should have spent more time with Kathy (and would have if she had told any of us she was sick). We sure as Hell are going to spend more time with Mark, and plan on heading back to Cleveland again to do just that as soon as possible.
We also need to find someway to take this site to a level where it can be entertaining for readers on a daily basis, but not something that feels like a tortuous burden to us, which it really had become. When you are in a zone, and fully committed to something to the point that you live and breathe only that, you don’t even realize how much it has taken over your life.
Wake up in the morning: have to get out an article or two for HillBuzz.
Lunch break: use the hour to score a few more posts for HillBuzz or moderate comments.
Rush home from work to start second (or in at least one of our cases, third) job writing evening content for HillBuzz.
2am: crash, setting ourselves up for another night with only 4 hours of sleep because we spent too much time on HillBuzz.
We ran that schedule nonstop for the better part of a year and a half until life just plum knocked that particularly precarious house of cards down.
But going forward, we do think this is a useful outlet in a time when the MSM truly is a party propaganda machine and the socialization of America is perhaps the greatest threat to this nation that we’ve faced, at least in our lifetimes. We see merit in the continued investment of ourselves into HillBuzz, but changes will have to be made to balance things from a quality of life standpoint.
The thing that finally jarred us out of the depression we’d all been collectively in was a recent attack on Sarah Palin here in Chicago over this past weekend that was just the sort of thing we’d race to a computer to write all about (see forthcoming article in next post above). We truly believe Sarah Palin is running for president in 2012 and want to do everything we can to help her win the nomination and boot Dr. Utopia from the White House before he can succeed in reducing this great nation to “just one of 190 countries in the world”, the way he aspires.
Our focus going forward is going to be very Iowa and New Hampshire-heavy, as we try to determine how best to win the first Caucus and Primary for Palin in 2012. A lot of this will be reflecting on what worked and what failed for Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries.
We sadly do not believe Hillary Clinton will ever be president at this point, which truly breaks our hearts to admit. Things are going to get so much worse between now and 2012, that almost any Republican will be able to defeat Dr. Utopia, but we believe things will rebound in 2014 or so and whoever that Republican is will get a second term. Clinton will be 69 in 2016, and 73 in 2020. It doesn’t seem likely she’ll ever have another shot at the Oval Office…but we hope she runs for Governor of New York in the future…or, more far-fetched but highly possible, is made the first female UN Secretary General (and the first American one too). It remains hard for those of us on the ground that HRC is out of politics for the time being, because we’d love to be out there campaigning for her.
We’d also love to be openly campaigning for Sarah Palin, too. And can’t wait until the red/white/blue moose logos start popping up everywhere, as we expect a Palin campaign would utilize.
Coming back from downtime like this is like an athlete coming off an injury. It was immensely hard to write this post, especially when logging in we get hit with all the nasty remarks in comments. We love that people enjoy reading us, but we hate to keep reminding you that you don’t own us and we don’t work for you. Putting all of our free time and energy into something works only as long as life doesn’t suck up all that energy or time for something else — or, ominously, a perfect storm of catastrophes that rock very personal worlds.
There is so much potential to use this as a platform to educate and organize for 2012 so we can stop the Liberals and get America back on course again…and that potential is worth the sacrifice of living under the yoke of this corner of the Internets. But it is indeed a struggle and a challenge and a burden each and every day. Like we say to all the trolls who stop by to drop their turds and run: try starting your own site, creating original content every day, while trying to manage a job (or jobs) and have some semblance of a personal life. It is hard, hard work.
But, if there’s a chance all of this could be worth it for Sarah come 2012 (or for Hillary, dare we dream, should Dr. Utopia elect not to seek a second term), then that chance is worth the investment on our parts.
